For more than a quarter century, the Jurix conferences, held under the auspices of the Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (www.jurix.nl), have supported cutting edge research and applications at the interface between law and computer technology.

This volume contains the proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (Jurix 2013), which was held on December 11–13, 2013, at the University of Bologna.

In its surroundings both ancient and charming, the Faculty of Law of the University of Bologna is a delightful venue in which to learn about the most up-to-date research on automating legal reasoning and the delivery of legal services.

Researchers from 13 countries in Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia submitted papers, each of which was reviewed by three members of the Program Committee comprising experts from 17 countries around the globe.

Of the 48 submissions, 16 were accepted as full (ten-page) papers for presentation at the conference and publication in these proceedings. An additional six submissions were accepted as short (four-page) papers with shorter presentations.

The papers cover a wide range of research topics and application areas concerning the advanced management of legal information and knowledge, including computational techniques for:

• Classifying and extracting information from, and detecting conflicts in, regulatory texts.

• Modeling legal argumentation and representing case narratives.

• Improving legal information retrieval of, and extracting information from, legal case texts.

• Conducting e-Discovery.

• Applications involving intellectual property and IP licensing, online dispute resolution, delivering legal aid to the lay public, and organizing the administration of local laws and regulations.

For the first time in the Jurix conferences, a doctoral consortium was offered to graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs. The goals of the consortium are to introduce the participants to a network of established researchers and other graduate students in the field and to provide feedback on students' research projects and questions.

Two eminent researchers presented invited talks at the conference. Professor Gerd Brewka, a member of the Computer Science Institute's Intelligent Systems Department at the University of Leipzig, delivered an invited talk entitled, “Abstract Dialectical Frameworks and Their Potential for Legal Argumentation”. He presented a new model for argumentation frameworks, Abstract Dialectical Frameworks (ADFs), that captures more general forms of argument interaction than are supported in a Dungian framework. Professor Adeline Nazarenko of the LIPN, Institut Galilée Université Paris-Nord delivered an invited talk entitled, “How to Assist Human Formalization of NL Regulations: Lessons from Business Rules Acquisition Experiments” . She presented a method for formalizing business rules for decision systems and a tool to assist domain experts and knowledge engineers to explore textual sources of business regulations written in natural language and to help them interact in deriving formal business rules from the source documents.

Three interesting workshops were planned for the first day of the conference: the Second International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and IP Law, a joint workshop comprising the Fifth Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and the Complexity of Legal Systems (AICOL) and the Special Workshop on Social Intelligence and the Law, and the First Workshop on Legal Knowledge and the Semantic Web. Such workshops play a vital role in the field, identifying new opportunities for research and incubating efforts to address them.

Acknowledgments

The Program Committee deserves recognition and thanks for spending so much time and effort in carefully reviewing an unusually large number of submissions under severe time constraints. The Jurix 2013 Conference could not have taken place without the help of the following Program Committee members:

• Michał Araszkiewicz, Jagiellonian University, Poland

• Katie Atkinson, University of Liverpool, UK

• Floris Bex, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

• Alexander Boer, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Joost Breuker, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Pompeu Casanovas, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

• Jack G. Conrad, Thomson Reuters, USA

• Tom van Engers, Leibniz Center for Law, The Netherlands

• Enrico Francesconi, ITTIG-CNR, Florence, Italy

• Anne Gardner, Atherton, California, USA

• Thomas F. Gordon, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Berlin, Germany

• Guido Governatori, NICTA, Australia

• Hans Henseler, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands

• Rinke Hoekstra, VU University Amsterdam/University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Jeroen Keppens, King's College London, United Kingdom

• Thorne McCarthy, Rutgers University, USA

• Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium

• Paulo Novais, Universidade do Minho, Portugal

• Monica Palmirani, CIRSFID, University of Bologna, Italy

• Radim Polčák, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

• Henry Prakken, Universiteit Groningen & Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

• Paulo Quaresma, Universidade de Evora & Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

• Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts, USA

• Antonino Rotolo, CIRSFID, University of Bologna, Italy

• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute, Florence – CIRSFID, University of Bologna, Italy

• Ken Satoh, National Institute of Informatics and Sokendai, Japan

• Burkhard Schäfer, University of Edinburgh, UK

• Uri Schild, Bar Ilan University, Israel

• Erich Schweighofer, University of Vienna, Austria

• Leon van der Torre, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

• Bart Verheij, Universiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

• Vern R. Walker, Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, USA

• Douglas N. Walton, University of Windsor, Canada

• Radboud Winkels, Leibniz Center for Law, The Netherlands

• Adam Wyner, University of Liverpool, UK

• John Zeleznikow, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

Thanks also to Monica Palmirani and Antonino Rotolo for organizing the Jurix 2013 Conference in Bologna, and to Henry Prakken, chair of the Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (Jurix) for his constant support and good counsel.

Kevin D. Ashley

Program Chair

School of Law, Intelligent Systems Program

Learning Research and Development Center

University of Pittsburgh, USA

ashley@pitt.edu